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Of brutal attack and unconditional love. Long live Aruna Shanbaug...

We had diagnosed her for pneumonia and she was on antibiotics. She was responding well to the treatment and we were planning to wean her off the ventilator. On Monday morning, she suffered a massive heart attack. We tried reviving her but in vain, the dean said. Earlier, the 67-year-old nurse had spent a month in MICU in November 2013 for pneumonia

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After spending 42 years in KEM Hospital in a comatose condition, Aruna Shanbaug, the former nurse who survived a brutal sexual assault by a ward boy, breathed her last on Monday morning. Shanbaug, who was shifted to the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) on May 12 after she developed breathing problem, died of a massive cardiac arrest, said Dr Avinash Supe, the dean of KEM.

"We had diagnosed her for pneumonia and she was on antibiotics. She was responding well to the treatment and we were planning to wean her off the ventilator. On Monday morning, she suffered a massive heart attack. We tried reviving her but in vain," the dean said. Earlier, the 67-year-old nurse had spent a month in MICU in November 2013 for pneumonia.

The news of her demise led her long-lost relatives to head towards KEM to claim her body. While the relatives staked their claim to conducting her last rites, nurses at the hospital strongly objected, saying Shanbaug belonged to them and as per the Supreme Court, KEM was her custodian. As the debate on her last rites continued, Dr Supe announced that the last rites would be jointly conducted by him and Shanbaug's nephew Vaikunth Nayak.

Being a medico-legal case, post-mortem was expected to be performed, but the hospital authorities chose to take a no objection certificate (NOC) from the police in order to avoid autopsy. "Since it was a known case and she had been admitted for a long time, getting an NOC was apt," said Dr Supe.

Dr Amar Pazare, head of the medicine department who had been looking after Shanbaug all these years, said, "Last five years, I had been taking care of her. In November 2013, she successfully battled pneumonia. We were hoping the same magic this time too."

Ganesh Bhagat, a businessman whose daughter is admitted in KEM's Ward-22 MICU, said, "I had read about Aruna madam in newspapers. I feel lucky that I met her."

Bhagat said that Shanbaug was kept in the ICU bed next to the doctor/nurse station and that a nurse was in attendance 24x7 to monitor her condition. "Her bed was enclosed with cloth partition. Nurses used to be with her 24x7. I had read about how nurses took care of her, but in the last few days, I witnessed it," added Bhagat.

Shanbaug had been living in the hospital's Ward No. 4 in a vegetative state for more than three decades now. The room outside her ward on KEM's ground floor had been home to her since she was rendered paralysed in a brutal sexual attack in 1973.

Sohanlal Bartha Valmiki, the ward boy who assaulted her, had pinned her down during the act and, in order to stop her from screaming, tied a dog chain around her neck which caused serious damage to her brain cells, reducing her to a vegetative state.

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